Why Policymakers Should Ignore Public Opinion Polls

by Robert Weissberg

Robert Weissberg is a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Executive Summary

Policymakers often assume that public opinion
is a reliable guide to making public policy,
but they should not. Public opinion polling measures
the wishes and preferences of respondents,
neither of which reflect the costs or risks associated
with a policy. Public opinion expressed in
polls cannot inform policy choice, which
requires attention to tradeoffs among values, to
second-best possibilities, and to unexpected
risks.

Polls are unlikely to be improved enough to
help with policy choices. Improvements would
make the product (poll results) too expensive or
too difficult to obtain from weary respondents.
We should not expect to see the day when polling
can replace reasoned policy choices by elected
representatives of the people.

Despite all the fancy numerology surrounding
modern polling, the extracted advice should
not guide public policy. Although public desires
for "more government intervention to help (fill
in worthy cause)" are real in that people sincerely
crave the promised improvement, those cries
for government action fail to meet even the most
minimal standards of legitimate counsel. This
paper shows how little polls tell us about public
policy and why we should ignore the proffered
guidance to policymakers.